it's always wonderful to be with you time even under the circumstances

indeed indeed hi i was talking a little earlier about my concern that uh... natalie harp is is playing kind of the role of respite and uh... or hitler's career courtiers you know that they're giving donald what he wants to hear rather than what he needs to hear and this latest polling is really in the crapper for him.

You know him really, really well, plus you have the insights that come with having a PhD in clinical psychology and having been in practice.

How do you think that, how desperate do you think he might be, and we can talk about that in the context of the elections or anything else here, and what might he do out of that desperation?

He will always do the next worst thing, whether that is a tactical nuclear weapon in Iran, abandoning our ally Ukraine, which quite frankly he did a long time ago, or using the power of the presidency to declare martial law and cancel an election he knows his party is going to lose.

An old friend of mine, I used to, Armin Lehmann was a dear friend of mine.

Back in the 80s, we traveled around the world for a couple of years together.

We were working at that time.

oppressed

yet cuz yeah we're well specifically In the Powell memo, he said that Rachel Carson's book, Silent Spring, which kicked off the environmental movement in 1963, and Ralph Nader's 1964 book, Unsafe at Any Speed, which kicked off the consumer product safety movement, that these two authors and these two movements were going to lead America to communism and destroy the free enterprise system.

That's the preface to the Powell memo.

And he names them.

I mean, he names these two people and these...

So anyhow, he, you know, he says, you got it.

So that was 71.

Yes,

This is another book in the series of books that you've done.

Yeah, this is well, this is a standalone book.

It's not part of the Hidden History series, but it's it's back back in 2002.

I was digging around a law library in Vermont, the Supreme Court Law Library, and got the original 1888 printed edition of the Supreme Court proceedings from 1886.

Because I wanted to write, I was working on a book called Unequal Protection about the 14th Amendment.

And according to everything I'd read at that point, in 1886, the Supreme Court said that the 14th Amendment, which says that all persons are entitled to equal rights under the law, due process, you know.

equal protection under the law, I think was the phrase, that included corporations, that person's designation included corporations.

In fact, we made a, I don't know if you realize it, but I was an executive producer of the Legalized Democracy and you appeared on it.

Mm-hmm

... which has absolutely no legal standing or legal power whatsoever.

It's there basically for law students and, you know, reporters and anybody who's looking for a good summary of the case.

And I mean, these date back to John Marshall.

And, um, and in that headnote it says, "The court is of the opinion that the 14th Amendment applies to corporations as persons, and they're entitled equal protection under the law." I'm paraphrasing, but it es- said, said essentially that.

And I'm like, "Whoa, you know, we're, we've based 150 years of law on this headnote, and it has no legal standing?" And he's like, "I, you know, I'm just the librarian here." So I went down the street to a friend of mine who was a lawyer and, uh, Jim Ridolfo, and I said, you know, "What do, what does this say to you?" And he...

I, you know, I bought, I paid my 50 cents and got copies of the whole decision, you know, and took it down to Jim, and he read it.

Yeah.

What does that mean in terms of dollars and cents? Because that's kind of where you, any financial goal you want to set the target and work backwards.

How do you do that? There's a couple different ways we do it on Sorted.

But the short answer, because people live so differently, is that you'd want personalized advice.

And good advice is gold.

So we can talk about that, and we've been making inroads there.

But a couple ways on the tools that we offer.

One is you look at what retirees are spending now.

But yeah, I mean, what do you do? A few things

So Finding ways to allow people to own homes in this country is ultimately a good thing.

Yeah, and always great to see you, Ali.

Thank you so much.

There's a lot of dimensions to this.

I mean, you've got the homelessness crisis, which we can talk about.

You've got what you just pointed out, that this is throughout at least the last 100 years, home ownership in the United States has been the single largest entree point into the middle class for people, at least building wealth throughout the course of their lives.

Obviously, unions and good wages and all those things are important.

Maybe that's good, maybe that's bad, but it's hard to buy a house in America.

When you look at the ballroom, the arch, the reflecting pool, they're, they may just be vanity projects that are easy to dismiss, but you think it's a symbol of something more sinister.

What's r- Yeah, it, it, thank you, Ali.

Uh, what's really destructive about this is how corrosive it is to public trust.

You can't have a functioning democratic republic without public trust, without the, the public believing that the government is actually on their side.

Um, we've seen during times of crisis in America throughout our history, the American Revolution, um, the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln putting together the, the, uh, US Sanitary Commission, where people actually helped out Union soldiers and, and, you know, brought in, you know, volunteered, uh, uh, brought in things.

World War II, uh, you know, you mentioned the, uh, all the things associated, and I would add a 90% top income tax rate during World War II on individuals, 50% on corporations.

There was always a sense that, yes, number one, there's something really important going on here, defending democracy, for example, or s- [laughs] keeping the Union together.

They're not even trying to suggest that austerity is not something, i- is something that we should be sharing.

Something will have, have to follow, whether it's, uh, behavioral changes that are mandated by the government or legislation.

Yeah.

In my, in my book, uh, The Hidden History of Big Brother, I, I kinda laid this out and, and in a recent article as well, using the metaphor of a, a house.

If your neighbor ran-- uh, put a big sign out in front of his house that said, you know, "Friday night big party, everything's allowed," and then Friday night comes, and you've got people selling pornography, you know, illegal pornography, and selling guns and shooting up drugs and just all kinds of criminal activity going on, you wouldn't just bust the criminals, or the police wouldn't come and just bust the criminal.

They'd also bust the guy who owns the house.

Well, in this case, you know, the social media outlets are essentially the house.

So there's two issues here.

It's, it's the argument that many insiders have told us for years, "This is not a bug, it's a feature."

Mm

... you know, it wasn't as, as acute.

Here we have somebody, it appears, your uncle, uh, Donald Trump, who thinks of himself not as a president of the United States, but as the emperor of America.

I'm, I'm, I'm quite certain, based on the things he's said, he's never read, or certainly doesn't understand, the US Constitution.

Is that the...

Uh, uh, number one, do you, do you agree with that analysis? And I, I, in fact, I would extend it.

I would say that if you look around the world, you see the same thing in Malaysia, you see it in Indonesia, you see it in Turkey, you see it in, in, uh, Egypt now, uh, you know, where, where, uh, uh, you see it in China and Russia, obviously Hungary, you know, where autocrats have basically taken over countries, and it's the exact same script.

Yeah.